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Competitive gaming has been around a long time on the PC with professional Starcraft leagues or tournaments for games like Quake and Counter-Strike. The Xbox 360 has made competitive gaming much more popular in recent years with the pro-gaming console league Major League Gaming, or MLG for short, and has begun to be classified as a sport by many gamers. Even sports news coverage, such as ESPN, have bought into this new fad called E-Sports (electronic sports) and now covers MLG games on their website and even sometimes mentions it on Sportscenter. You can even buy a gaming chair with a theme of your favorite team. That's how big its become.

Getting Familiar with eSports Leagues

There are a lot of gaming leagues out there. There's the MLG, CAL, CPL, GGL, Gamebattles (actually a branch of MLG), Starleagues, and many others, some more legitimate or popular than others. Sure there are different sports leagues, but I don't think anybody is going to say that in America there is a football league more legitimate or popular than the NFL or a hockey league more legitimate and popular than the NHL. Why doesn't gaming have one legitimate league? Why is it so fragmented? If it was a true sport, it should have a unity of organization. Instead, leagues are just privately owned and run which leads to so many different ones. Are players in MLG better than a player in CPL? Who knows, they are different leagues with different games. I can confidently say players in the NHL are better than players in a European League.

This brings me to another point, the organization of E-Sports is nothing like a sport. There is no regular season, there are only events and ladders. Even the leagues that pretend to have seasons are only running ladders for a specific time-frame and call it a season. Ladders don't work like seasons because you can join or leave a ladder at any time. If you go 0-5 on Gamebattles, delete your team and remake it and you erase your bad start. Teams don't have the same number of games played. You can challenge other teams at your whim so you never have to play a team that you know could beat you unless you reach the Playoffs. Real sports aren't like this. There aren't just a handful of tournament-style events throughout the season.

Making it More Like Traditional Sports

Overall, E-Sports leagues seem to be trying to make gaming appear to be a sport without actually making it into one. Like the addition of coaches in MLG games like Gears of War and Halo. That seems like a completely ludicrous addition to professional gaming and one that doesn't even make it more like a sport. Why does a gamer need a coach?

To make gaming into a sport, they should make organizational changes. Let's continue to use MLG as an example. A Halo 3 team in MLG should have to be sponsored by a corporation or person. A sponsor doesn't just pay for trips to Meadowlands and give you cool gaming rigs. That person should own the team and they make the roster changes. If Ogre 1 and Ogre 2 don't like Walshy anymore, too bad. They don't have a say, the sponsor does. Teams shouldn't be just a group of friends that got together one day and have played together ever since. They should be solid foundations that will exist years from now, with our without it's current player roster.

Each team would have the same number of games played. After the season is over, playoffs would be seeded and played in the tournament-style events like Meadowlands. That should be how playoffs are done. Right now it seems they have no relevance at all other than winning you money and giving you points.

There should also be a scouting combine. You can't simply up and join an MLG competition one day. You will have to enter into a separate league and compete there until you are invited by a team owner to join an MLG team. That would give legitimacy to the league and also probably weed out a lot of want to-be's and posers because they aren't going to want to compete and travel a lot.

Documentary, as the name implies, are films produced with the intention of being an audio-visual documentation of a concept or event.

A documentary film is intended to be much more like a piece of journalism than a piece of entertainment or expressive art. There is typically a voice-over narrative going on throughout a documentary film with the narrator describing what's being seen in a business-like way without any dramatic reading. Sometimes documentaries can be just as entertaining as a comedy, or just as heart-breaking as a drama.

Documentary films are often made to more deeply explore a current events or history subject that has remained shrouded in mystery, been controversial, or in the opinion of the film maker misunderstood or underexposed. Documentaries have also been made simply to record an event of personal interest to the film maker.

Biographies, sports and music events, a compilation film of collected footage from government sources, and so on and so forth all may be subjects for a documentary film. Documentary film makers are typically the writers, directors, and producers. Often they may act as cameramen as well

Quality documentaries usually include interviews at some point. This is a technique for lending authoritativeness to the film's producer by getting people to speak from first-hand knowledge about the subject matter or an aspect of it. A documentary film also has to be well organized in an interesting and logical format. Unlike with many fictional movie stories, a documentary should never deliberately confuse, mislead, or leave something mysterious. Multiple perspectives or opinions can be highly effective at giving a documentary film depth.

Top 3 eSports Documentaries

Here is the first installment of top 3 eSports documentaries to check out when you're up for something other than an hour and a half of Hollywood fluff:

Group Razor Presents: "Great Games", the conclusive sports documentary. It's the general close down for those players who know they've been beaten in the hardest mental field of cutting edge gaming: sports. "Great Games" takes after 3 of the most surely understood sports today – StarCraft, Dote 2 and League of Legends – bringing the history and the general population of the freshest brandishing wilderness into core interest.

"Free to Play" is a full length documentary that takes after three expert gamers from around the globe as they go after a million dollar prize in the main Dote 2 International Tournament. As of late, E Sports has surged in ubiquity to wind up a standout amongst the most broadly honed types of competitive game today. A million dollar competition changed the scene of the gaming scene and for those tip top players at the highest point of their art; nothing could ever be the same again. Created by Valve, the film reports the difficulties and sacrifices required of players to contend at the most elevated amount

Today, there are more individuals on the planet who play League of Legends than there are individuals who live in France. We needed to peer inside this quickly growing universe of competitive gaming, so VICE host Matt Shea travelled to South Korea, a country where supposed "sports" can either make you rich and well known or land you in recovery.

Esports simply put is competitive video gaming. However, in reality esports is much bigger and more competitive than one might imagine. In fact, gaming has become so popular that kids who are exceptionally good are signing sponsorships deals, and earning millions of dollars.

When the word esports is uttered, those who may not know better might assume someone is talking solely about video games mimicking sports. However, esports potentially refers to any game that can be played competitively. Although some games are better suited for competitive plays. Esports is also not limited to one game counsel, although PC and xbox games are some of the most popular.

Top Earning Esports Games

Players earn money and sponsorship by ranking in the top places in esports tournaments. Dota 2, a multiplayer online battle arena game, has given over 10 million dollars in prize money so far this year. Counter-strike: Global Offense, a first-person shooter game, follows that with having awarding about 9 million in prize money. Halo 5: Guardians, League of Legends, and Heroes Of The Storm, have earned players over 2 million in prize money. These five games are only a small sample of games that host tournaments in which players compete for money, and status. The lowest earning game is Reflex, awarding only 37 dollars.

How Esports Tournaments Work

Tournaments are considered to be the “backbone” of esports. They allow players to earn a name for themselves, and if someone is good enough to become a professional gamer they can live off tournament earnings. There are a variety of tournaments, ranging from local to international tournaments. Tournaments also attract many sponsors, because so many people are a part of esports. In 2014, the League of Legends World Championship attracted 27 million viewers, and that was just the viewers, not the actual players.

Ways To Be Involved In eSports

The most obvious way to become involved in esports, is to play the games. While playing in professional tournaments is the way to earn money, prestige, and sponsorships, eports also hosts tournaments for amateurs. However, playing esports is not the only way to feel involved. Esports has essentially created a community of gamers, and they host their tournaments over Twitch Channels. This allows anyone to watch and be a part of the tournament. Esports reaches over 70 million people worldwide, the majority of the demographic being young males. Being involved in esports can raises self-esteem, teaches teamwork, and allows players to meet and play with new people.

The internet is not the only way esports reaches its community. ESPN has also occasionally aired tournaments, although it isn’t as popular as online streaming. Some countries such South Korea and the United Kingdom have built esports stadiums. Esports has also adopted a typical sport tradition: gambling. A company called Unikrn, allows people to place bets against the house, and participants can only bet on the outcome of a single match. However, people living in the United States cannot take part in this, as online gambling is illegal in the U.S.